The US-Israeli War on Iran Is Illegal and Immoral

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Introduction

On Saturday, February 28, at the early hour of 2:30 a.m., Donald Trump, the executive head of the criminal organization in Washington, DC, announced that a major military operation was underway to implement regime change in Iran.

Dubbed “Operation Epic Fury”, the action was coordinated with Israel, which simultaneously launched its own “Operation Roaring Lion” against Iran.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the Jewish supremacist state who is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC), echoed the same rationales in declaring the mutual aim “to put an end to the threat from the Ayatollah regime in Iran.”

One of the first strikes killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled since the death in 1989 of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the Islamic revolution in 1979 that overthrew Washington’s puppet ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Trump claimed justification for launching this war on the grounds it is necessary “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”. He cited three rationales.

First, he said Iran was responsible for supporting acts of terrorism throughout the Middle East, including supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian armed group Hamas, which on October 7, 2023, broke out of the Gaza concentration camp and killed about 1,200 Israelis, taking 251 others hostage back to the Gaza Strip.

Second, he claimed Iran has been developing nuclear weapons. He referred to the joint US-Israeli strikes in Iran in June 2025, saying that the US military’s “Operation Midnight Hammer” had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. He said that the US had warned Iran not to resume pursuit of nuclear weapons and “sought repeatedly to make a deal”; but instead “Iran refused and rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions” and “attempted to rebuild their nuclear program”, along with developing missiles that could reach Israel, US allies in Europe, “and soon reach the American homeland”.

Third, he claimed an intent to “free” the Iranian people from an oppressive regime that had “just killed tens of thousands of its own citizens” as they protested in the streets. “Finally, to the great proud people of Iran,” Trump proclaimed, “I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.”

The truth, however, is that Trump’s war on Iran is itself a criminal act based on false pretexts and grounded in sheer hypocrisy. Trump and Netanyahu are both war criminals guilty of the crime genocide in Gaza—a far greater crime than anything for which Iran has been accused.

As Trump knows, there is no evidence Iran has been developing nuclear weapons.

Finally, Trump’s claim that he cares about the welfare of the Iranian people is patently untrue.

Americans choosing to support Trump’s actions are allowing themselves to be deceived by standard war propaganda used in every act of aggression by the criminal regime in Washington.

The Supreme International Crime

Like the illegal war of aggression against Iraq initiated in March 2003, the present US war on Iran is being described as “preemptive”. However, there is no “imminent” threat against the US from Iran that would render this military action an act of self-defense. Under international law, acts of war for which justification is claimed based on hypothetical future attacks—like a nuclear strike by Iran—are synonymous with the crime of aggression.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal defined aggression as “the supreme international crime”: 

War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

The US and Israel are both members of the United Nations. Under the UN Charter, which has been ratified by the US Senate and is therefore part of the “supreme Law of the Land” under Article VI of the US Constitution, states are prohibited from the threat or use of force in international relations.

The only legitimate use of force under international law is when it is necessary for self-defense against armed aggression or authorized by the UN Security Council. The UN did not authorize any use of force, and Iran has not attacked the US. Therefore, by definition, Trump’s war is not defensive but an act of aggression.

War is not peace. The idea that international law must be violated to uphold international law is the same Orwellian premise always used to justify every war of aggression perpetrated by the criminal regime in Washington.

Debunking the False Pretexts for War

Every war of aggression by the US regime requires a propaganda narrative to manufacture Americans’ consent for the crime. As with the Iraq war, the false pretexts cited to justify the current aggression are designed to conceal the true reason for regime change, which is to remove an impediment to global US military and dollar hegemony and to Israel’s continued theft of Palestinian land and expulsion or extermination of its indigenous population.

Iran’s Terrorism vs. the US and Israel’s

The US regime claims to oppose terrorism, but this is patently untrue. The observable reality is that the US is just fine with terrorism—and far worse crimes—when it serves Washington’s geopolitical agendas.

Time and again, the US has formed tacit alliances with, if not directly supported, terrorist organizations.

Al-Qaeda, the organization involved in perpetrating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, arose from the US regime’s involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War during the 1980s. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited “mujahedeen” fighters out of the same madrassas, or religious schools, from which the Taliban arose. (“Taliban” is plural for “talib”, which means “student” in Pashto.)

The CIA, operating in coordination with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), worked alongside the later head of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, in an effort to first provoke the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan and then to bleed it of resources—to give the USSR “its Vietnam War”, in the words of then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The US also intervened heavily in Syria beginning in 2011 to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad, once again siding with terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. After breaking ties with al-Qaeda, Nusra became known as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, which in 2017 merged with other factions to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Arms funneled by the CIA from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Syrian rebels largely ended up in the hands of extremist groups. The US war on Iraq and its support for armed groups in Syria also fueled the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned in an August 2012 memo that the unraveling situation in Syria raised “the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, which was “exactly what the supporting powers in the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime”.

HTS was led by Ahmad Hussein al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and after armed groups succeeded in overthrowing Assad in December 2024, HTS emerged as the dominant force. Sharaa, the head of a designated terrorist organization, then became the de facto ruler of the new Syrian regime.

In July 2025, the Trump regime removed HTS from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, and Trump hosted Sharaa at the White House on November 10, 2025. Trump said of Jolani, “He comes from a very tough place, and he’s a tough guy. I like him, I get along with him.”

Birds of a feather.

Another example is the US regime’s protection of the Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK), an exile organization dedicated to regime change in Iran. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, the US protected the MEK despite its designation as a terrorist organization. According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the US conducted military training for members of the MEK in Iraq, which also had ties to Israel’s intelligence agency the Mossad.

When the US State Department removed the MEK from its list of terrorist organizations in September 2012, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), an organization advocating human rights and democracy in Iran and diplomatic approaches to achieving peaceful US-Iranian relations, objected by stating,

The NIAC deplores the decision to remove the MEK from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. This decision opens the door for Congressional funding of the MEK to conduct terrorist attacks in Iran, makes war with Iran far more likely, and will seriously damage Iran's peaceful pro-democracy movement as well as America's standing among ordinary Iranians.

As for Israel, it was literally established by Zionist forces through the crime of ethnic cleansing, effected in large part by systematically terrorizing the Arab population of Palestine into flight.

The US does not oppose terrorism as a matter of principle. It only opposes criminal violence by its geopolitical adversaries while turning a blind eye to, if not directly participating, in the criminal violence of partner regimes.

The idea that the US and Israel oppose criminal violence is beyond ludicrous. Their own violence against civilians occurs on an incomparably greater scale than any acts of terrorism Iran is accused of supporting, including Hamas’s “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023. The criminality of that operation pales in comparison to the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza—a crime against humanity fully supported by both the Biden and Trump regimes.

The false pretext is exposed by the hypocrisy of Trump’s claim to be fighting terrorism. If the US and Israel wished to end terrorism and other criminal acts of violence, they would simply cease perpetrating such violence on a massive scale.